Why Use Revenue Cycle Management Companies?

Medical billing is the cornerstone of your practice’s financial success. If your practice is struggling to keep up with medical billing, revenue cycle management companies can help. These companies offer a range of services from outsourcing to temporary support through medical biller staff augmentation to get your practice back on track. Here is how your practice can benefit from the usage of a revenue cycle management company.

What Do Revenue Cycle Management Companies Do?

Revenue cycle management companies provide medical billing and other revenue cycle support to practices. These companies offer a range of services from co-sourcing by using temporary billing staff augmentation to cover absences or for special projects to full outsourcing of medical billing functions. For example, TempDev’s TempBill offers short- and long-term billing staff augmentation to cover absences or staff shortages, as well as full outsourcing of medical billing. Consultants at these companies can also help your practice identify problems and bottlenecks in your revenue cycle and suggest solutions.

If your practice has fallen behind on medical billing, revenue cycle management firms can help you catch up. These companies can also help you with special projects like credit balance clean-up, AR follow-up, and claim edit coding fixes so you can stay on top of your revenue cycle with fewer issues with your accounts revenue.

Your practice size and internal capabilities will help determine the type of support you need from revenue cycle management companies. The level of assistance needed is up to your practice, make sure that what the RCM group is offering works best for your practice and you don't feel pushed into outsourcing everything. There are alternatives to completely outsourcing your entire RCM.

Outsourcing to Revenue Cycle Management Companies

Smaller or solo practices may benefit from outsourcing critical revenue cycle tasks like medical billing. With outsourcing, you can avoid hiring and training in-house medical billing specialists. If your practice is small, this may save you money and hassle. Simply share your visit and encounter data with a revenue cycle management company and they will handle billing, follow-up, and resubmission of denied claims.

However, outsourcing your medical billing to a revenue cycle management company gives you somewhat less control over your data and your billing process. With outsourcing, your partner revenue cycle management company handles all billing and collections, including from patients. Under this model, your practice may not have access to patient and payer account information to help you make policy and workflow changes.

Outsourcing may also make it more difficult to change your workflows to reduce claims denials and speed reimbursement. In-house medical billing specialists can help you identify gaps in providers’ coding and documentation so you can improve your office visit workflows. Revenue cycle management companies will have less insight into the processes that may cause billing errors, making it more difficult to fix underlying problems. For medium and larger practices, you may get more long-term value from hiring internal medical billing specialists.

Many practice management and EHR vendors are now offering revenue cycle management engagements also and this typically includes substantial discounts on their software. Either the licensing will come at no or very little cost to your practice and engaging with these vendors may help practices offset their initial software investment.

Co-Sourcing with Revenue Cycle Management Companies

Many practices think they must either outsource or insource their medical billing. But there is a middle ground – co-sourcing. Under co-sourcing, your practice works together with a revenue cycle management company to handle your medical billing and/or accounting processes. Co-sourcing models often use a staff augmentation approach and often for a flat fee rather than a percentage of collections. This means that the revenue cycle company’s billers or consultants work in tandem with your staff to provide support for your billing and revenue cycle needs.

When you co-source with a revenue cycle management firm like TempDev’s TempBill, you form a partnership to improve your billing processes and boost your revenue cycle. With TempBill, billers and consultants can help you customize your NextGen system to support more efficient medical billing. Co-sourcing avoids some outsourcing pitfalls because the revenue cycle management company is part of your team and able to identify problems and bottlenecks in your coding, documentation, and billing processes.

Temporary Revenue Cycle Management Support

Revenue Cycle Management companies can also provide temporary support for big projects, or planned absences. Temporary staff augmentation or consulting services can support your practice’s day-to-day billing needs when your permanent staff members have to focus on other projects or system upgrades.

Temporary support from revenue cycle management companies can also help you clear one-time backlogs of medical bills or denied claims. Billers from these companies come pre-trained so they can immediately get to work supporting your staff. TempDev’s TempBill medical billers can provide expert NextGen support to help your practice get back on track.

Temporary support may also be a good option for covering planned absences like parental or medical leave. Medical billing is highly specialized, so it may not be possible for other staff to fill in for an absent colleague. To keep your practice from falling behind, you can hire a temporary medical billing specialist from companies like TempBill. These billers are pre-trained in your NextGen system and can get started helping your billing department right away.

Get Revenue Cycle Management Help at TempDev

If your practice is struggling to stay on top of billing, TempDev can help. With TempDev’s TempBill services, you can get temporary billing staff, co-sourcing, or outsourcing to help you manage your revenue cycle. TempDev can also help your billing staff reconfigure NextGen to improve your billing efficiency so you do not get behind again.

Call us at 888.TEMP.DEV or contact us here for revenue cycle management co-sourcing or outsourcing.